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An
Ohio killer who fatally stabbed an elderly couple should be spared from execution because of a
troubled childhood, lousy legal representation and a prosecutor who violated rules of conduct at
trial, his attorneys said yesterday.

The case of Charles Lorraine, scheduled to die by injection Jan. 18, is similar to that of
another inmate whose life was spared by a federal appeals court on grounds of prosecutor
misconduct, his attorneys argue.

Records show Lorraine stabbed 77-year-old Raymond Montgomery five times with a butcher knife and
stabbed his bedridden wife, 80-year-old Doris Montgomery, nine times, before burglarizing their
home in 1986. The couple had hired him to do odd jobs.

Lorraine’s attorneys made their case for mercy to the Ohio Parole Board, which will present its
recommendation next week to Gov. John Kasich.

Lorraine, 45, of Warren, is just above intelligence levels indicating mental disability, his
attorneys said in a filing presented to the board. He turned to prostitution and burglary as a boy
to meet his parents’ demand for bingo money.

“Chuck never had a chance in life,” his attorneys said in the filing.

They say Lorraine’s defense at trial was left in the hands of young, improperly supervised
attorneys. They also say the prosecutor violated trial rules by reminding jurors that Lorraine did
not testify under oath on his own behalf.

A federal judge threw out Lorraine’s death sentence in 2001 for that and other reasons, but a
federal appeals court upheld the death sentence the next year.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the prosecutor’s comments were an “isolated remark”
that didn’t warrant throwing out the death sentence.

Defense attorneys say a panel of the same appeals court in 2003 citied similar prosecutorial
misconduct when it overturned the death sentence of Rhett DePew, who killed the wife, daughter and
sister-in-law of his former landlord in Butler County in 1984.

DePew is serving life without parole.

Prosecutors say Lorraine deserves death, citing the brutality of the killings and the fact that
he used the money he stole to party and bragged about the slayings.

Wearing rubber gloves and brandishing a butcher knife, Lorraine attacked the couple on May 5,
1986, after they’d told him not to come back because they realized he was stealing from them.

“Lorraine coldly and brutally stabbed to death two frail, elderly citizens in their own home,”
the Trumbull County prosecutor’s office said in a filing with the parole board. “In a textbook
fashion, Lorraine meets the classic definition of a psychopathic killer.”